Police crowd-control tactics have changed dramatically since Kent State protests

Associated Press, Plain Dealer Historical CollectionOhio National Guard troops patrol the Kent State University campus on May 6, 1970, two days after four students were shot and killed during anti-war demonstrations.When a phalanx of Ohio National Guardsmen marched shoulder to shoulder up Blanket Hill 40 years ago to break up an antiwar rally at Kent State University, they carried basic battlefield gear and a military mindset.

Their World War II-era M1 rifles were tipped with bayonets and loaded with .30-caliber bullets that could fly nearly two miles.

Only steel helmets shielded them from the rocks hurled by protesters. Their training favored combat tactics, and their orders permitted them to shoot if rioters wouldn't clear out. The command for the crowd to disperse was delivered over a bullhorn, after printed leaflets failed to dissuade students from gathering.

View full sizeMarvin Fong, The Plain DealerPittsbrugh police, backed up by their truck-mounted Long Range Acoustic Device, prepare to disperse protesters at the G-20 economic summit in September 2009.Flash forward to Pittsburgh in September 2009. Protesters at the G-20 economic summit were confronted by police imported from around the country and specially trained in crowd control by the Department of Homeland Security.

View full sizeCharles Moore, Black StarBirmingham police use dogs on civil rights marchers in this 1963 photo taken for Life magazine. The overt brutality and occasional lethality police employed against dissenters in the 1960s – the dogs and fire hoses that terrorized Birmingham civil rights marchers, the clubbing of demonstrators and bystanders alike at Chicago's Democratic National Convention, the mass shootings of protesters in Orangeburg, S.C. and Jackson, Miss., that book-ended Kent State – are mostly gone.

Outrage at the bloody ending atop Blanket Hill helped spur the development of new "less-lethal" weapons and, more importantly, a seismic shift in the philosophy underpinning protest policing.

The old "escalated force" approach, with its intimidation, intolerance for disorder and a hair-trigger penchant for head-knocking and indiscriminate arrests, gave way to a kinder, gentler stance. Police began negotiating with protesters prior to events, brokering deals on everything from the placement of loudspeakers to how much resistance demonstrators would put up before letting themselves be handcuffed.

From the 1970s through the 1990s, conciliation and restraint were the bywords when police dealt with dissenters. As sociologists Clark McPhail and John McCarthy note, protester David Dellinger of the "Chicago Seven" was tried for conspiracy after the 1968 Democratic convention riots, but at the 1996 convention it took him five days of attempts before police finally arrested him.

During the last decade, though, the detente between police and demonstrators has eroded. For a variety of reasons, cops have reverted to tougher tactics, especially when policing large, high-profile protests like the Pittsburgh summit, according to researchers who observe such events and study law enforcement policy.

This new approach, dubbed "command and control" or "selective incapacitation," blends elements of both previous strategies. Police may negotiate small issues, but they impose strict limits on where, when, how and even if people can protest.

Their plans stress advance surveillance and intelligence-gathering, a massive show of force, zero tolerance of disruption, and quick arrests and lengthy detentions of people they identify as provocateurs, sometimes even before a rally happens, and without probable cause.

The new pre-emptive policy seem to have lessened the risk of widespread, violent protester-police clashes, many protest policing experts conclude, but at the expense of free-speech rights.

"There's definitely a tradeoff," said sociologist John Noakes (pdf), director of the criminal justice program at Pennsylvania's Arcadia University. "You're using force to prevent things from happening. By doing that early, and with these less-lethal weapons, there's no blood on the street, no obvious moment or casualty that becomes a rallying cry. Obviously you don't want people killed, but force is force."

Police haven't completely abandoned negotiation as a tactic, with some departments insisting that it remains their first resort. But it clearly has fallen from grace when large protests are anticipated, a decline that can be traced to an infamous dustup in Seattle in late 1999.

View full sizeDan Krauss / Associated PressA police officer kicks a demonstrator during a confrontation between police and anti-World Trade Organization protesters in Seattle in December 1999. The city was host to a week-long meeting of the World Trade Organization, whose international trade summit had spawned large, raucous protests in Geneva, Switzerland, the previous year. As Seattle police admitted in a contrite
after-action report(pdf), they "put [our] faith in . . . the Seattle tradition of peaceful protest" and assumed "that the worst case would not occur here."

They were disastrously wrong. Though many organizations did peacefully march, well-organized and uncooperative protesters caused major disruptions, forcing cancellation of the first day's events, while small bands of anarchists shattered windows, scrawled graffiti and caused extensive property damage.

"Those are almost separate groups and separate types of problems, but they've become fairly conflated in the minds of the police," said sociologist Alex Vitale of Brooklyn College, who's extensively studied law enforcement's response to the "Battle of Seattle." Cops "now see these summits and meetings as being incredibly fraught with the fear of broken shop windows and disruptive protests."

Seattle became a watershed event -- a clarion call for police to crack down, and a rallying cry for protesters who felt their non-cooperation had scored a victory. Noakes said a Philadelphia police commander he interviewed compared Seattle to Pearl Harbor.

"What he meant was they were so surprised that it happened," the researcher said. Previously "there had been this sense that you could talk to protesters . . . and turn protests into parades. So when Seattle occurred, if felt on both sides like a bit of a betrayal. I think both sides realized the game had changed."

View full sizeRick Bowmer, Associated PressDemonstrators and police clash near the World Bank in Washington, D.C., in April 2000. Just how much police tactics had changed became apparent only four months later, on a Saturday morning in April 2000, as demonstrators in Washington, D.C. readied for anti-globalization protests set to begin the next day.

Police raided the protesters' warehouse headquarters on the premise of a fire code inspection. Identifying numerous violations, they evicted 200 people and sealed the building until after the economic summit ended, blocking protesters' access to their communications gear and political material.

Later that day, police arrested about 600 marchers for parading without a permit and obstructing traffic, even though, as the New York Times reported, the demonstrators had a police escort and stayed mainly on sidewalks.

Other groups of largely peaceful protesters were hit with batons, doused with pepper spray, and detained for hours without access to food, water or lawyers, according to an

D.C. Metro police continued aggressively policing unpermitted demonstrators at anti-globalization rallies in September 2002, where 400 people in a public park near the White House – protesters and bystanders alike – were surrounded by a police cordon and penned for two hours.

An investigation of both incidents by the D.C. City Council's judiciary committee faulted the police department for violating citizens' constitutional rights, ignoring guidelines for use of force and mass arrest, and improperly spying on and preemptively detaining protesters.

The rebuke didn't deter other cities from employing even harsher measures.

View full sizeAl Diaz, Miami HeraldIn Miami in 2003, police push back protesters at the Free Trade Area of the Americas summit. The aggressive protest policing tactics have become known as the "Miami model."In what has come to be known in law enforcement circles as the "Miami Model," police at the Free Trade Area of the Americas summit in November 2003 imposed strict limits on times and locations of protests, including using heavily barricaded "exclusion zones" to keep demonstrators far from meeting sites.

They planted undercover officers among protest groups, made pre-emptive arrests and used an arsenal of less-lethal weapons, including concussion grenades and Tasers.

In a notorious incident captured by TV cameras, Miami lawyer Elizabeth Ritter, wearing heels and a business suit, cowered under her hand-lettered sign reading "Fear Totalitarianism" as a riot-clad officer shot her in the forehead with a rubber bullet.

"I don't know who got her, but it went through the sign and hit her smack dab in the head," Broward County Sheriff's Office Sgt. Michael Kallman chortled in a police training video, as fellow deputies hooted and clapped.

Sheriff's officials later apologized for the remarks, though not for the assault. Miami's civilian review panel (pdf) determined that officers used "indiscriminate" force on Ritter and others during the protests, including firing less-lethal weapons at bystanders and retreating protesters.

The panel also criticized police for failing to protect demonstrators' First Amendment rights, and for profiling, unlawfully searching, arresting and detaining them. Of the 219 people arrested, only four were convicted. The city, county and various police agencies paid more than $560,000 to settle various legal complaints.

In New York City, host to numerous political events, the transition to more aggressive and preemptive protest policing tactics pre-dated even the Battle in Seattle.

Brooklyn College's Vitale contends that it arose in the mid-1990s, an outgrowth of the NYPD's overall "broken windows" philosophy – a highly-touted technique that aims to stop even minor law-breaking and rowdy behavior, because it supposedly creates a permissive climate where more serious crimes can take root.

"They started using it to manage these sports crowds and the Times Square things, and they realized they liked it a lot better," Vitale said. "It gave them so much more control."

View full sizeRichard Perry, The New York TimesAn environmental activist sits inside a "protest pen" erected by the New York Police Department for a 2002 World Economic Forum demonstration.The New York protest policing method isn't usually as bluntly forceful as the Miami Model. As Vitale has observed first-hand, it's a micro-management approach, where police dictate all aspects of the event ahead of time rather than negotiating with demonstrators or allowing them to police themselves.

The NYPD often denies permits for street marches, or forces protesters to march in remote locations that won't disrupt city life. Rallies take place in fenced-off areas – protesters derisively call them "freedom cages" – with internal barriers to prevent people from moving freely and external checkpoints to control who enters and leaves.

For a "shock and awe" effect, hundreds or thousands of officers deploy at protest events. They make mass arrests as soon as permits to demonstrate expire, and use horses, motor scooters, and less-lethal weapons to scatter people who stray into the street or fail to disperse.

New York and other cities that have adopted the more forceful tactics seem willing to accept the resulting legal costs in exchange for preventing disruption. (The NYPD did not respond to repeated interview requests for this story.)

"The immediate benefit for law enforcement is you get those people off the street and you don't have to deal with them," said

Heidi Boghosian (pdf), executive director of the National Lawyers Guild, which defends First Amendment rights. "But then you're going to face protracted and costly litigation after the fact."

"Protesters in some cases have gotten more than $1 million" in legal claims," said Boykoff. "You'd think that would be a countervailing force, but I've seen no evidence that has deterred police."

View full sizeStephen Chernin, Getty ImagesAbout 200,000 demonstrators marched in this New York City protest in 2003 against the Iraq War.No one disputes that protest policing is difficult, stressful, potentially dangerous work with little margin for error. Officers "either exert too much force and inquisitions occur, or they don't exert enough and inquisitions occur," said University of Idaho sociologist Patrick Gillham. "They lose either way, unless they find this very narrow middle ground."

From street level, cops face-to-face with jeering, resisting demonstrators can't tell the size or state of the overall throng, and may instinctively assume everyone is a threat.

Conventional police wisdom holds that a crowd is a mob waiting to happen and bad behavior is contagious. It's a suspicion rooted in the classic psychological view of crowds as inherently volatile – a "hive mind" whose members respond as one and are easily swayed by agitators. Cloaked by anonymity, the theory goes, crowd members feel free to fling rocks, overturn cars and misbehave in ways they'd never consider when alone.

Sociologists such as Clark McPhail long ago debunked that notion.

McPhail, the dean of American crowd behavior researchers, author of "The Myth of the Madding Crowd" and an observer of protests dating back to the 1960s, has documented that crowds are not single-minded. They're composed of sub-groups whose membership, moods and allegiances shift as conditions inside and outside the crowd change.

It's rare for an entire crowd to collectively act violently, McPhail said, though it may seem that way to someone caught in the middle of a conflict.

His friend, British police officer turned sociologist Peter "Tank" Waddington was on duty during London's infamous Poll Tax Riot in 1990. Years later, the pair reviewed videos of the event as part of their research, and Waddington was surprised at how few people in the crowds actually were clashing with police.

View full sizeCarl Court, APA British police officer is hit by a burning object thrown during demonstrations outside the Bank of England in London last spring."He said, 'If I was involved in a skirmish, I assumed that was going on everywhere, but it wasn't,'" McPhail recounted. "You can only see what's immediately around you. Somehow that message has to get out to police overall," since overreaction can incite anger, galvanize bystanders and trigger the wider conflict that officers are trying to prevent.

Heal, the former L.A. County deputy, and Patrick Connolly, assistant chief of the Urbana, Ill., police department, are McPhail devotees who've studied crowd behavior research and various protest policing tactics, and applied what they've learned. Both believe in an approach that's restrained, strategic and doesn't trample First Amendment Rights.

Connolly trains the state of Illinois' seven regional

Mobile Field Force teams, small tactical units of officers specially skilled in crowd control. They've been dispatched to control NCAA Final Four basketball celebrations, labor disputes, and to assist at the Pittsburgh G-20 summit.

"Most [protesters] have the absolute right to be there, and our job is to protect them as much as it is to make sure that law violators are arrested," Connolly said. "This old mentality of getting 100 officers shoulder to shoulder to take the whole street did nothing more than move the problem from one block to another. If you identify those few agitators and deal with that problem at its lowest level, with a smaller group of police, we seem to have more success."

View full sizeMark Wilson, Getty ImagesA Washington, D.C., police horse wears a protective shield during crowd control duties at a 2002 economic summit protest.As the debate about street tactics continues, protest policing has moved into cyberspace, too. Though law enforcement agencies won't discuss it, demonstrators and those who study them have found anecdotal evidence of surveillance, profiling, database-building, and something like a no-fly list for dissidents.

Police in cities hosting political events can query other jurisdictions about protesters they've arrested. "This information appears to be shared across nations," said Gillham, the Idaho sociologist. "Activists leaving the United States to go to the G-8 protests in Canada have been stopped at the border with information apparently garnered from Homeland Security. I've interviewed activists who were denied entry.

"Police are now able to find out information about people and classify them," Gillham said, a practice called social sorting. "It's like protester profiling. People can be stopped because they've been somewhere before, maybe arrested before. The assumption is they're going to potentially commit a crime and they can be stopped or interviewed. What's troubling is [the protesting arrests] are often for activities that are considered a misdemeanor."

Besides the prior-restraint concerns of such profiling, there's the potential for bias.

Last year, sociologists Sarah Soule of Stanford University and Christian Davenport of Notre Dame analyzed 15,000 U.S. protests from 1960-1990. They found that demonstrators' race affects how police treat them, with blacks consistently more likely to be treated forcefully or arrested.

With the rise in repression and increasingly sophisticated police methods, some dissidents have given up – if not entirely, then at least on street demonstrations.

View full sizeNational Guard BureauToday, the National Guard Bureau has specially trained and equipped "reaction force" teams in each state to assist local police departments with crowd control duties. "They’re taught that everybody has their rights and freedoms and those need to be protected and preserved," says Col. Thomas McGinley, the National Guard Bureau's provost marshal.

"I think some of this has been so overwhelming that people have stopped protesting," said Gillham.

Others are fighting back, using some of the same tactics as police do.

At the Pittsburgh G-20 summit, protesters used cell phone cameras to record and relay information on police movements. "We've got a picture of one of the guys taking pictures, because we were doing the same thing to them," said Heal. "That shows a level of sophistication we haven't seen in the past."

Protest organizations such as the Ruckus Society operate websites where demonstrators can download training manuals. Facebook and other social networking outfits let protesters share information and mobilize quickly. Online petition sites make it possible to collect thousands of signatures.

"Because street protest is becoming repressed or losing its teeth, it's been pushed to the online realm," said Soule, who studies organizational behavior. "The tactics are changing in ways that are under the radar to most people."

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